Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937) is among today's most imaginative composers, and his music sounds like no one else's. Compositions for piano are the most important part of his works. They cover a wide range of genres, including both varios piano cycles and sonatas, as well as large-scale compositions for piano and orchestra.
Beginning his creative career in the radical Soviet Avant-Garde, Silvestrov demonstrated an almost painful sensivity to the intimacy that music can create between performer and listener. He would later refute his modernist roots. The elegiac, poetic and highly personal relationship with silence has come to characterize his most recent music.